By Michael Eck
Special to The Times Union
LATHAM – Mix three parts nitro-glycerin, two parts potassium sulphate and one drop of blood and you have “Chemical Imbalance: A Jekyll and Hyde Story.”
The play is currently on view at Curtain Call Theatre in a gloriously silly production directed by Cindy Brizzell-Bates.
In recent years there has been a theatrical trend of sending up classics in over-the-top fashion and “Imbalance” certainly falls squarely into that realm.
Robert Louis Stevenson’s quintessential tale of the battle between good and evil has been adapted any number of times before, but never in so patently goofy a fashion. And never with so many men dressed as women (and vice-versa).
This adaptation, by Lauren Wilson, paints Dr. Henry Jekyll more as a buffoon than as a mad genius, and the action that spins all around him is even crazier.
“One can’t tamper with old books just for fun,” Euphronia Jekyll says at the end of act one with a purposeful wink. In the play, the remark regards a torn prayer book, but Wilson makes her self-referential point clear.
Brizzell-Bates has placed the story in the doctor’s own drawing room, which set designer Michael Blau has turned into a fully-fledged Victorian yard sale of upended chairs, knick-knacks and detritus.
It’s a fitting echo of the entropy of the Jekyll household, where Euphronia (Chris Foster, with his burly frame pushed into a bad ball gown) lords over her loony brood.
Patrick White plays Jekyll and his natural manic tendencies are given full flower in the role. His contorted changes from Jekyll to Hyde not only had the audience in stitches at Sunday’s matinee; they also cracked up fellow actor Kevin Gardner, playing Jekyll’s cousin, Xavier Utterson.
Gardner is a great second-fiddle and in his many scenes with White he piled on the comedy without ever upstaging the main character.
The rest of the cast is filled out with other local notables including Kathleen Carey (who gets to stretch her comic legs a little more than usual here) and Jack Fallon, whose legs are comic (he’s dressed as a woman, too).
The house staff gets in on the action as well, with Barbara Richards and Lynn Scott veering back and forth from being servile to subversive as the story unfolds.
Erin T. Waterhouse and McKinley Fallon complete the cast as the lovely love interest, Rosamunda Dewthistle, and a pair of good and evil identical twins. The young Fallon garners plenty of laughs flitting on and off as one or the other of the latter duo.
Curtain Call has long made a habit of balancing funny fluff with high drama. This is the former for sure, but you’ll laugh, yes, you will.
In fact, at Sunday’s matinee, one woman particularly cracking up in the front row was as entertaining as the rest of the show.